signified something divinely imprinted in itself which might lead on to allegorical, tropological, maybe even anagogical insights into the history of salvation; the Historia was written under pressure from its anticipated Benedictine audience.

Light in Tiepolo's Hound--be it physical, spiritual, painted or remembered--finally reveals itself as the most dense metaphor, or the metaphor for metaphor, a partly virtual and partly actual entity that may be understood by analogy with Dante's theorisation of the multiple meanings, layers or facets of poetic language: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical.

One of the ways Wise bolsters this claim is by contrasting Derrida's relationship to figuration and allegory in the context of Jerusalem with the four-part Christian allegorical exegesis: literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical.

Thus at an anagogical level the Third Boy's gift of a lowly shepherd's pipe reflects the divine dynamics of (g)lo(ria)'s aurality, bestowing upon God the prerogative to summon mankind into resurrected presence with the blast of a trumpet at the end of history.

He cannot free himself from conscience (which in any case, from O'Connor's vantage, is no freedom at all); he abandons the experiential perception of sight for a purely anagogical vision; he is made to recognize his utter powerlessness beside the presence of God without; and he is brought to a profound and painful acceptance of guilt, a debt that he alone cannot pay.

Indeed there are quite a few cases of secular cantus firmi or even of short citations within a mass movement or section for which a Christian allegory or even anagogical reading might seem a bit forced, if not wishful.

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